While this is a promo for Kosmic Sound, it does a pretty good job of introducing some of the key differences to consider in buying a MIDI control keyboard and looks at examples from Behringer, AKAI, M-Audio, Novation and Roland.

This video kind of starts where my last video ‘Vernal Season’ left off.

It begins with a 4-step sequence on the Synthesizers.com Q960 with only step 1, 3 and 4 active on the Q963 trigger bus. During the song I alternate between the 3 rows of the Q960 using the Q962 sequential switch. The Q960 drives the Rob Hordijk OSC HRM, one Synthesizers.com Q106 VCO and the Ian Fritz Teezer Through-Zero VCO connected to the Blacet Miniwave.

The Mellotron strings, played on the Roland XP-80, joins and after that a 4-step sequence on row one of the Doepfer MAQ16/3 driving the Creamware MiniMax ASB. An 8-step sequence from the MAQ16/3 driving the self-built Modular joins after that.

The Klaus Schulze like S&H percussion comes from the Waldorf Q Keyboard. The solo’s are performed on the Clavia Nord Lead 1.

This video, via TheDaydreamSound, takes a look at the vintage Ensoniq ESQ-1 synthesizer:

The Ensoniq ESQ-1 is a hybrid digital-analog synthesizer released by Ensoniq in 1986. The ESQ-1 offers 8 voices with 3 digital oscillators per voice. Each oscillator could be set to one of 32 different waveforms. Some of these were standard simple waveforms such as sawtooth and pulse, while others were samples such as piano and voice.

Each oscillator also had an associated DCA (not VCA) to control its volume in 256 steps. In addition to that, an ESQ1’s voice featured 3 LFOs, 4 envelope generators, a 4-pole resonant analog lowpass filter (VCF), and a final VCA with left/right panning. It also sported a 61-key velocity-sensitive keyboard, full MIDI implementation, memory for 40 patches, a memory cartridge slot, and an 8-track sequencer. A rackmount version called the ESQ-M was also released circa 1987, with exactly the same specification minus the sequencer.

The ESQ-1 was produced until 1988.

If you’ve used the Ensoniq ESQ-1, leave a comment with your thoughts on it!